Airtel Launches Facebook by Fonetwish via USSD in India

How many times do we wish that if we had internet/gprs on our phones, but cannot due to our cost conscious nature? Or are Text Messaging proves costly for you to update your status? Well, Airtel is here to the rescue. Today, Airtel launched a USSD-based Facebook access service in India- Facebook by Fonetwish (The first of its kind).

USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) is a menu-based system that enables interfacing with content based services. Instead of a browser, which requires an internet / GPRS connection), the USSD menu acts as browser to pull content to the phone. It is a protocol used by GSM cellular telephones to communicate with the service provider’s computers.

It can be used for WAP browsing, prepaid call- back service, mobile-money services, location-based content services, menu-based information services, and as part of configuring the phone on the network. Airtel has indeed pulled off a genius coup by offering this affordable service and is exclusively for Indian Airtel customer which is absolutely amazing.

Airtel Mobile Users will be able to update their FB status absolutely free. They’ll also be able to access the full feature application which includes viewing news feeds, commenting on or liking news feed stories, posting on friends’ walls, confirming friend requests, viewing notifications, and finding as well as adding friends at Re. 1/- per day (If you use i.e).

We tried this feature in a number of handsets but so far we’ve not been successful in gaining access. There seems to be some glitch, we would keep trying to get it working, meantime do tell us if this worked for you?